


m.i.r.a.c.l.e.s.

by johnny cade (johnnycake)



Series: Pleasing the Stars [2]
Category: Watchmen (2009)
Genre: F/M, Vignettes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-11
Updated: 2017-07-11
Packaged: 2018-11-30 18:37:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11469360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/johnnycake/pseuds/johnny%20cade
Summary: wow it took me how long to finally write this again?? heh. welp i did. so here we are.





	m.i.r.a.c.l.e.s.

**Author's Note:**

> wow it took me how long to finally write this again?? heh. welp i did. so here we are.

Laurie didn’t have time to admire the beauty of the Red Planet known as Mars located one-hundred forty million miles from the Blue Planet known as Earth before black spots began appearing on the edges of her vision. She couldn’t breathe in the thin Martian atmosphere and the lack of oxygen was shocking. Mere moments earlier she’d been able to breathe without thinking, now she was gasping for air on her knees.

The light touch of Jon’s fingers at the base of her skull registered dully in her mind as she struggled to draw breath, but, as twinkling dots of light lit up in a dome around her a moment later, she was finally able to. She coughed and realized she could hear again at the same moment that she realized Jon was speaking. She only caught the end of the sentence, but she could make a pretty good guess at what the beginning of it had been from the end’s contents.

“Forgive me, these things sometimes slip my mind. It won’t happen again.”

“That’s comforting,” she replied. She wasn’t sure if she were being serious or sarcastic. As Laurie pushed herself to her feet, she noticed Jon was staring at the space directly in front of them. She turned her gaze in the direction of Jon’s and her eyes widened as she saw for the first time a moving glass sculpture that looked like nothing she had ever seen on Earth. As it moved, knocking against other parts of itself, she could hear what sounded like a chorus of many bells tinkling all at once. Vaguely, she recognized that it would take human hands decades or centuries to build the Earthen equivalent whereas she knew it had taken Jon most likely only a matter of minutes to erect the work of art before her.

“Oh my god,” she breathed out, unsure if her breathlessness was due to the previous lack of oxygen or just pure awe at Jon’s glass creation. “I’m on Mars,” she added, uncertain of what else she could say. It was a fair exclamation. No other human being had been on Mars before. She wasn’t sure she could count Jon as human, so she was the first.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jon look at her as she continued to stare in awe at the glass...clockwork was the only term she could come up with for it. As soon as she thought it, she remembered that Jon’s father was a watchmaker when he was growing up. His father had even started to teach him how to take over the family business before he gave it up shortly after Einstein discovered time was relative. It made sense that any art of his, whether subconsciously or not, would reflect this.

She wondered if he would’ve made a very good artist, had his life gone differently.

_If his life had gone differently, he would still be with Janey instead of you._

As always, Laurie felt a pang of guilt at the thought of Jon’s exgirlfriend. It had happened over fifteen years ago at this point, but she still felt bad. She’d known from the beginning Jon was married and still flirted with him. There had been a few times she’d done it right in front of Janey. It had been after she and Jon had started staying late after Watchmen meetings, sitting on top of the building and kissing in between long conversations about everything they could think up, but it still made her feel horrible. She had stolen Jon away from her. She’d been the one to make him cheat when she’d known he was taken.

 _You can’t steal someone who doesn’t want to be stolen,_ the voice of her mother reminded her when she’d tried talking with her about this years earlier.

But that didn’t change or prevent or get rid of the pain she’d caused Janey or the fact that she had knowingly flirted with and made out with a man who was already in a committed relationship. It didn’t matter that she’d ended up being with Jon for fifteen years rather than only eleven as Janey had been. If she hadn’t come along, they probably would still be together.

“Shall we go up?”

Jon’s voice took her out of her guilt-ridden thoughts of the past and back to the present. She blinked and looked at the clockwork glass structure before her. She could go inside it, Jon was saying. She couldn’t see how they could fit in from this distance, but she assumed there must be a way. Despite his lapse in memory when he’d first brought her to the Red Planet, Jon was usually very conscientious of the fact that Laurie was a human and he was not. If he said that she too could walk inside the structure before her, then odds were that was true.

Jon led her to the structure and then up several glass staircases. They were somewhat hard to ascend in her heels, but she was spending so much time staring all around at what she was walking in, that she hardly even noticed.

As they got to the top of the last staircase, Laurie looked up and saw a large expanse of smooth glass in front of her, revealing the Martian landscape spread out several stories beneath her. On the horizon, she could see the bright sphere of the sun. It was evening here on Mars, much as it was evening back on Earth. It hit her again that she was the only human being to ever have witnessed a Martian sunset.

“This is where we hold our conversation,” Jon said, bringing her back again. She remembered at once his reason for bringing her from Earth to Mars: he’d told her they were going to discuss the end of the world, or, more precisely, she was going to try to convince him to save it. She knew she had to. Everyone else on the planet was depending on her powers of persuasion. She swallowed hard. She wasn’t sure putting all of Earth’s future on her abilities was such a good idea to begin with.

“In it, you tell me that you and Drieberg have been sleeping together,” Jon continued.

Guilt squeezed at Laurie’s heart again – it seemed this was the type of person she was destined to be; how long before she broken Dan’s heart as well? – along with surprise. “You know about me and Dan?” she asked, turning to look at him.

“Not yet,” Jon replied, turning as well; he too had been staring out across the Martian landscape, “but in a few moments you’re going to tell me.”

Laurie stared at the glass floor, her brows not even drawn together in surprised confusion anymore. At this point, she was just used to not understanding anything he had to say. She shook her head slightly, clearing it of whatever it was he meant by his previous sentence and asked, “If you know the future, then why were you surprised when I left you? Or when that reporter ambushed you?” She paused, but continued before he had time to reply, “Why even argue about it if you already know how this is going to end?”

“I have no choice,” Jon replied tonelessly. “Everything is preordained. Even my responses.”

This time Laurie did look at him with confusion, but there was also frustration and disgust etched into the small lines on her face. She was sick of this. Sick of his mind games and him not being clear and him keeping secrets. She was sick of it all. “And you’re just going through the motions?” she asked, unable to keep the frustration out of her voice. “The most powerful thing in the universe is still just a puppet.”

She meant to make the last word sound despicable, like a curse, but Jon’s reply, even as he looked at her with an expression she could only define as mock surprise, was still toneless and uncaring and only served to infuriate her further: “We’re all puppets, Laurie. I’m just the puppet who can see the strings.”

“And what if you’re wrong?” she jumped in immediately, now pleading with him.

Jon turned his body to face her. “Why does my perception of time distress you so?”

“Because it’s inhuman!” she pleaded, her hands clenched into angry fists at her sides. “Because it makes me insane! You always say you wanna comfort me, well it isn’t working!”

He looked away from her, turning his body away again. _His_ expression was the confused one now and for a moment, she felt her anger dissipate and she felt something she hadn’t felt for him in a very long time: pity. He hadn’t chosen to be this person. He hadn’t chosen to have that accident happen. It was only by sheer happenstance that he’d come back at all. And it wasn’t his choice to come back like this. She was certain some days he would’ve preferred to stay dead. But what was done was done and there was nothing and no one who could turn back time. Not even Dr. Manhattan could do that.

She sighed and turned away. “Look, I don’t want to fight,” she said more gently. “I’m sorry I slept with Dan.”

Jon let out an audible and angry sigh. “You slept with Dan?” he said it more as a statement rather than a question and in an instant Laurie felt all her anger come back.

“You just said that you already knew about that,” she retorted.

“I said... _often..._ that you were my only remaining link to humanity,” he said, turning to look at her again. She could see no emotion in his eyes, but his voice was ragged and, despite her anger, she felt the guilt she’d felt before creeping back in. “Why would I save a world that I no longer have any stake in?”

Fear flooded her in an instant as she realized what he meant.

Why should he save the world now that she no longer loved him?

But that was untrue. Just as it was untrue that he no longer loved her. Trying desperately to appeal to this part of him, she said, her voice steady and gentle as it had been a moment earlier, “Then do it for me. If you really care.”

“When you left me, I left Earth,” Jon replied, sounding more broken than he ever had, “does that not show you that I care?”

There was nothing to say to that because he was right. She heard him add something about how his red world now meant more to him than her blue one, but the guilt was drowning out her ability to hear this time. She had left Jon when he needed her most because she couldn’t be bothered to take the time to understand what he was going through. To be fair, he hadn’t really told her what he was going through to begin with and maybe by the time he had, it was already too late. But that didn’t change his words nor their meaning. He had always loved her. Even when she thought he didn’t. He’d left Earth because a life without her in it wasn’t one he was interested in living. And she, being as selfish and self-centered as she was, ran off to see Dan while he was being accosted for things he didn’t do on live TV.

She noticed vaguely that the glass clockwork structure was moving. He was taking her around the planet, she realized, to show her his new home, where he would be staying while Earth was incinerated in its own wrath and greed. She couldn’t exactly argue that it didn’t deserve it, but there were too many innocent people on the planet who had done nothing to contribute to its current state of being. And they definitely didn’t deserve to die along with the guilty.

Suddenly, Laurie felt angry again. Jon was going to let all of those innocent people die because she’d gotten angry and he’d left Earth and while he was gone, she’d slept with someone because she hadn’t known if she was ever going to see him again. Now he was holding that one act against the entire human race. He was going to let the entire world and all of its creatures die just because he couldn’t be bothered to care anymore. Because of her cheating. While she could understand to some extent how he felt, she also thought it was an incredibly selfish decision. She let out another frustrated sigh.

“Can’t you just tell me how this all ends? Save us the trouble?”

“It ends with you in tears,” he replied, still not looking at her.

“Tears?” she asked, the anger entering her tone again. “So you don’t come back to Earth?”

He glanced at her. “At some point, yes,” he said. “The streets are filled with death.”

“Jon! Please!” Laurie begged. “You have to stop this! Everyone will die!”

“And the universe will not even notice,” he retorted.

For the first time since their conversation began, Laurie felt panic well up inside her and she took a step back. What if Jon was right and she couldn’t convince him to come back? Was this really going to be how the world ended? Blown up by its own stupidity and greed? It sounded so ridiculous, so unnecessary. For a moment, she almost understood Jon’s reasoning, but then she remembered that Dan and her mother would also die. So would Hollace. So would everyone else she’d ever met or known or spoken to.

“In my opinion,” Jon said, moving towards her as though he had noticed her distress, “the existence of life is a highly overrated phenomenon.” She had to clench her hands into fists to keep herself from slapping him. His nonsense was going to drive her mad. “Just look around you. Mars gets along perfectly well without so much as a microorganism. Here, it’s a constantly changing topographical map, flowing and shifting around the pole in ripples ten thousand years wide. So tell me...how all of this be greatly improved by an oil pipeline? By a shopping mall?”

“So it’s too much to ask,” Laurie said, her mouth dry and her hands and voice trembling with panic and frustration, “for a miracle?”

“Miracles by their definition, are meaningless,” he said.

“Oh god, Jon!” Laurie burst out, stomping down the glass steps.

“Only what can happen does happen.”

“Just stop with your bullshit!” she shouted, turning back to look up the stairs at him. She turned away from him again and began stomping back down the stairs as she shouted up behind her, “Land this thing! Now!”

She barely heard his reply of “As you wish.”

“You know what?” she yelled down the stairs. Jon had moved faster than she could from their top to their base. “You can send me back to Earth to fry with Dan and my mom and all the other worthless humans, but know that you were wrong.” She walked right up to him, shoving her face in his. “You said this ended with me in tears and look! Nothing!” She didn’t hesitate before adding, “Maybe you were wrong about everything.”

“You complain I refuse to see life on life’s terms,” Jon said, looking down in to her eyes, “yet you continuously refuse to see things from my perspective. You shut out what you’re afraid of.”

“I’m not afraid,” she retorted instantly, instinctively. “You want me to see things your way? Go ahead, show me! Do that thing you do!”

Jon lifted his hand without hesitation and placed his thumb in the center of her forehand. In an instant, the world around her disappeared and she saw all of her memories all at once, going forwards and backwards through time until they stopped in the same place they always did: in that hallway, in the middle of that conversation she’d overheard twenty years ago.

“Magic,” her mother was saying. “Dreams. That is what I had before. I was a hero goddammit!” She stamped the ground as she finished speaking.

“It’s not my fault you got old,” her father replied. “What do you have to complain about? I’m putting food on the table for you and your child!” Her mother reappeared and her father pointed down the hall, back from where Laurie had come. “Why don’t you call you friend Eddie? Maybe he can give you a better life.”

The memory disappeared and she saw her mother from only a few days ago when she’d come to visit during Eddie Blake’s funeral.

Her mother’s finger lovingly stroked the picture of the Mintemen next to her lounge chair, her fingers trailing over her own and Eddie’s portraits as she said, “The past, even the grimy parts, keep on getting brighter.”

She was smiling, looking almost nostalgic.

That memory disappeared too and suddenly she was standing outside of the building the Watchmen used to meet in, watching Archie disappear. The Comedian was standing next to her and he said, “You know, your mom, she was one of the all-time champion beauties. You got her eyes you know.” He reached up to touch the mole below her right eye. “You got that same –”

“Take your hands off her!” she heard her mother shout.

In an instant, the two of them jumped apart like teenagers caught under the bleachers.

“Hey doll,” he said quickly, “long time, no see.”

“Not long enough in my book, Eddie,” Sally said, every word spitting anger. If looks could kill, he would’ve been dead. She turned to her daughter and just managed to spit, “Get in the car. Now.” before she turned back to the man in front of her adding, “Are there no depths you won’t sink to?” There was fear in her voice, Laurie noted as she headed to the car. She couldn’t understand the reason for it.

“Jesus Christ, Sally,” Eddie retorted, his own voice angry now, “can’t a guy talk to –” He paused. There was a very pregnant silence. Laurie turned to look at them just as Eddie finally managed to say, “...you know, old friend’s daughter?”

Laurie watched them talk from the back of the car for several moments before her mother got into the back of the car with her and said to the driver, her voice shaky, “Drive.”

As the car began to move, Laurie looked behind her out the window at the Comedian, shrinking under the streetlight in the distance.

The memory flashed back to the hallway.

“It was a mistake,” her mother was saying. “One time!”

“Guy tries to rape you and years later you let him finish the job?” her father retorted angrily. “What? Were you drunk? Or just lonely?”

He pushed past her as Sally collapsed onto the edge of the bed. “Am I ever going to live this down?” she asked herself, throwing her hands in the air as she did so. She looked up and seemed, for the first time, to notice her daughter in the hallway.

“Laurie,” she said her name in a horribly broken tone of voice.

The memory flashed to one of the Comedian in his hero outfit, leering at her.

Suddenly she understood and lurched back away from Jon as shock filled her.

She let out a heavy breath and realized she was trembling all over. “No,” she gasped out, feeling a lump already forming in her throat. Her throat seemed to squeeze as the realization reverberated through her. “No, not him.”

“The Comedian,” Jon said softly, “was your father.”

Laurie felt panic rising in her chest. She felt her hands begin to tingle and then go numb. She need to hit something, to punch something until it was gone. She looked wildly around her and saw the glass wall of the clockwork structure. She ran to it and slammed the side of her fist into the glass as she screamed, “No!” she did it several more times.

“No, no, no!”

Then she collapsed to her knees. She hardly noticed as a crack ran up the glass structure and brought the whole thing crashing down around her. She only avoided being crushed because Jon erected a dome of protection around her as she shook with sobs, staring at the red Martian ground, wondering if there was some way that all of this could be a lie.

“My life is just...one big joke,” she gasped out in a choked sob.

“I don’t think your life is a joke,” Jon replied.

“Yeah well,” Laurie replied, not looking at him and rolling her eyes, “I’m sorry if I don’t trust your sense of humor.”

The blue glow of Jon’s body was suddenly immediately to her left. She turned and saw him holding a hand out to her. She looked up at him as he said, “Will you smile...” she took his hand and he helped her to her feet, “if I admit I was wrong?”

“About what?” she asked.

“Miracles,” he instantly replied. He was staring at her with a searching look. She hadn’t seen that look in him for what felt like years. She remembered for the first time in just as long that was what she had come to associate with love. When he looked at her like he wanted to solve her, that was when he most loved her. He continued, his voice soft and gentle, “Events with astronomical odds of occurring like oxygen turning into gold. I have longed to witness such an event and yet I neglect that in human coupling millions upon millions of cells compete to create life for generation after generation until finally your mother loves a man, Edward Blake, the Comedian, a man she has ever reason to hate and out of that contradiction, against unfathomable odds, its you, only you, that emerged to distill so specific a form from all that chaos is like turning air into gold...a miracle. And so...I was wrong.”

Jon was smiling at her. She didn’t know how long it had been since she’d last seen him smile. Probably not since before the Comedian – her father – had died. Or perhaps it hadn’t even been since before he’d started his work with Adrian. In any case, it had been a long time since she’d last seen him smile and it took Laurie a minute to realize she was smiling back.

He did not often say the words _I love you_ , but he said it in other ways. And Laurie realized that was what he had done just now. She also realized that whatever their relationship problems, they could be solved. She wouldn’t be unfaithful to him ever again. She would try to understand him. She would do everything in her power to keep him in her life because she _did_ still love him. Just as he still loved her.

“Now dry your eyes,” Jon was saying, taking her hand in his. “And lets go home.”


End file.
